Hello, this is Chris Jakubik, Head of Investor Relations at Kimberly-Clark. Welcome to our Q4 and full year 2025 business update. Today, our Chairman and CEO, Mike Hsu, will provide an update on our overall business transformation and performance. Russ Torres, our President and Chief Operating Officer, will provide an overview of segment results and key market highlights. Nelson Urdaneta, our Chief Financial Officer, will provide a financial review and our outlook. We've also scheduled a separate live question and answer session with analysts. You can access our earnings release, supplemental materials, and audio of our Q&A session at investor.kimberly-clark.com. A replay of the Q&A session will be available following the event through the same website. During our review, we will make some forward-looking statements that are based on how we see things today.
Actual results may differ due to risks and uncertainties, and these are discussed in our earnings release and our filings with the SEC. We will discuss some non-GAAP financial measures during these remarks. These non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should be read together with the GAAP results. You can find the GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations within our earnings release and the supplemental materials posted at investor.kimberly-clark.com. With that, I will turn it over to Mike.
Thank you, Chris, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Two years ago, we launched our Powering Care strategy to usher in Kimberly-Clark's next exciting chapter, building on our 150-year legacy. We set out to transform our company and create durable growth. Since then, we've turbocharged our commercial cost and organizational capability. We've unleashed the strength of our iconic brands. We've doubled down on science as our competitive advantage. Our rapid evolution has been guided by exceptional leaders who are ready and excited for our next chapter. Our execution of Powering Care is driving strong results, even amidst a dynamic and somewhat turbulent external environment. Our 2025 results and the momentum we've built in the first two years of Powering Care reflect the enhanced strength and resilience of our business.
We're introducing consumer-directed, pioneering innovation and breakthrough marketing across brands and markets faster than ever before. We're bringing relentless cost discipline and deploying our greatest capabilities across the enterprise to optimize our margin structure. We've rewired our organization for growth, and we've pivoted our portfolio to higher growth, higher margin Personal Care categories. This pivot has enhanced our focus on right to win spaces and become a pure-play Personal Care company. This includes the sale of our Brazilian tissue operations, the sale of our PPE business, and exiting roughly $650 million of private label business. In mid-2026, we expect to complete a transaction to form an industry-leading International Family Care and Professional joint venture with Suzano, in which we'll own a 49% stake. These strategic actions have shifted our portfolio toward higher growth, higher margin categories, while reducing earnings volatility and capital intensity.
Our operational and strategic transformation has fundamentally repositioned our business and provides an excellent foundation and playbook to facilitate our pending acquisition of Kenvue. Acquiring Kenvue is a powerful next step in our transformation that we believe will enhance the momentum we're delivering across Kimberly-Clark. Consistent with our portfolio pivot, the transaction will catapult our trajectory toward higher growth, higher margin spaces. Kenvue's brands resonate with consumers and lead attractive categories. Combined, our categories have exposure to structural tailwinds across age and lifestyle cohorts. We have exceptional complementarity across categories and geographies, which will enable us to better serve consumers through every stage of life. We intend to build the future of consumer-centric care for all, with 10 iconic billion-dollar brands in critical life stages, including baby and childcare, women's health, and active aging.
The winning capabilities we've developed through Powering Care provide a plug-and-play model to take Kenvue's portfolio of market-leading consumer health brands to the next level. We intend to get Kenvue's brands on a virtuous cycle of growth, as we've done at Kimberly-Clark. This is what will enable us to build a scaled health and wellness leader, a leader that will be new and different in the world of CPG. We expect to generate $2.1 billion of annual synergies from the transaction net of reinvestment, including about $1.9 billion of cost synergies targeted within the first three years after close. We also expect to achieve solid EPS accretion in year two following close. Our targets are based on conservative assumptions and grounded in work we've already done, applying our lean operating mindset, cost discipline, and commercial execution engine at scale.
We're preparing to hit the ground running at closing and look forward to providing more detail as we achieve integration milestones. Russ is leading our Integration Management Office, and we're making strong progress. When both teams are together, the excitement is palpable. The IMO is staffed with leaders from both companies and external specialists with deep experience in transitions like this. We're taking a disciplined approach with clear accountability. We remain focused on delivering for consumers and customers every day. Our base business is driving strong results and has built strong momentum in a dynamic environment. Powering Care has created a virtuous cycle of growth at Kimberly-Clark.... It's a proven and repeatable value creation engine that drives sustainable, profitable growth and performance. Maintaining the virtuous cycle enables us to remain resilient regardless of what is happening around us.
As we move boldly into our next chapter with Kenvue, we're confident we can leverage our operating momentum to create significant value for shareholders and raise the standard of care for billions of consumers around the world. The innovations and initiatives we scaled since launching Powering Care have fundamentally repositioned Kimberly-Clark and launched us into a virtuous cycle of growth. The virtuous cycle starts with the skill and will to invest for impact. Investments we've made in innovation and marketing have differentiated our products and deepened brand love with consumers. This has driven our strong shift to volume plus mix-led growth. We've also doubled down on strategic partnerships with customers. At the same time, we transformed our organization and processes to maximize returns on those investments. We've improved enterprise-wide visibility and discipline and have made significant progress on cost efficiency.
Critically, we've embedded a growth and accountability mindset across the entire organization. These fundamentals helped us deliver financial performance that gives us the flexibility to reinvest and sustain the virtuous cycle. In 2025, the virtuous cycle helped us advance our volume plus mix growth model and deliver full year volume-led organic growth of approximately 2%. Enterprise weighted share was up approximately 10 basis points versus the prior year, despite an uptick in competitive promotion activity in the third and fourth quarters. International Personal Care focus markets saw broad-based share gains versus the prior year. The Q4 marked our eighth consecutive quarter of solid volume plus mix performance, and 2025 marked our second consecutive year of broad-based volume plus mix growth. We continue to drive solid results in a dynamic competitive landscape by maintaining a relentless focus on balanced and sustainable innovation-led growth.
Our model has enabled us to navigate headwinds, such as changes in the global tariff environment and short-term impacts resulting from private label business exits. Our categories are large, growing, and benefit from being used in our consumers' everyday moments. The intimacy inherent to Personal Care and health and wellness means consumers are less willing to make substitutions, making our categories resilient and durable. Our 2026 outlook, which Nelson will discuss in further detail, reflects confidence in our pipeline of initiatives, a commitment to strongly support our brands, and the reality that pressure on consumers and a focus on value will persist. We will outline our growth initiatives in greater detail next month during our presentation at the CAGNY Conference.
It's important to understand the momentum we've built since launching Powering Care, how it has positively impacted our 2025 results, and how we have prepared ourselves for this moment. Science is our competitive advantage, and our scientists and engineers have delivered. We're focused on innovating across critical consumer benefit spaces, including leak-free confidence, garment-like comfort, skin health, and overnights. Our innovation pipeline has never been stronger, and the products we've launched in the last two years are driving category-shaping performance behind premiumization to elevate the top tier while delivering unbeatable performance in the value tiers. Around the world, our great ideas are traveling faster than ever. We're scaling innovations across markets, exemplified by applying our China playbook to significantly enhance performance across focus markets like Brazil, Indonesia, and Australia. We're not stopping there. Due to the intimate nature of our categories, our consumers are confronted with stigma every day.
As category leaders, we take it upon ourselves to crush these stigmas and drive enhanced category participation and brand love. Over the last several quarters, we've shown you how we've been doing that across a range of authentic celebrity partnerships and emotionally resonant advertising. Our marketing teams are elevating creative with an impressive 11 Cannes Lions wins in 2025. Consumer-directed innovation has been the tip of the spear in our efforts to inflect volume plus mix organic growth. We were one of the first in the industry to successfully make this pivot coming off the last inflationary super cycle. In 2025, volume plus mix eclipsed pricing as a growth driver and accelerated. Innovation has led the charge with 78% of our volume and mix-led growth attributed to innovations launched in the last three years.
At the same time, what completes our virtuous cycle and funds the significant investments we've made in innovation, brand building, and commercial capabilities is a strong productivity pipeline. 2025 marks a second straight year of industry-leading gross productivity at 6.2% of Adjusted COGS, peaking at 7.2% for the Q4 , both of which exceeded the high end of our expected range. In the past two years, we have delivered 50% of the five-year gross productivity ambition we set out at Investor Day.... As I've mentioned, we are sharing knowledge and best practices across the organization. In short, we are scaling what works. As you can see at the bottom of the slide, we've lowered standard unit costs globally across our consumer business.
Within this, our Personal Care business has led the way, with baby and childcare, perhaps our most competitive categories, delivering the most progress towards our goal of delivering the best performing products at the lowest cost in the industry. We are laser focused on simplification, consistency, and leveraging our scale, which simultaneously enhances quality and value for consumers while allowing us to deliver the best product at the lowest cost. For example, we successfully reduced our Personal Care product platforms from 30 to 11 across 9 facilities. We took a decisive step to optimize our supply chain network in North America this year. We announced a $2 billion investment in our North American manufacturing footprint, focused on building an advanced manufacturing facility in Warren, Ohio, and an automated distribution center at our Beech Island, South Carolina plant. These investments will accelerate our innovation plans and support our growth ambitions.
We made significant progress modernizing our systems and core technology to drive simplification, automation, and agility for years to come. Critically, we've deployed global digital procurement capabilities and tools that bring transparency, control, and efficiency to our operations. Teams now spend less time on manual tasks and more time driving innovation and supporting our business partners. It also provides greater visibility into global spend. Just last year, our North American automation team rolled out laser-guided vehicles in our Ogden, Utah plant, using these LGVs to move materials inside our manufacturing facilities. Over the past 5 years, we have saved $48 million by launching LGVs in regional distribution centers. In summary, we've built strong momentum and great visibility into the key elements of our virtuous cycle. I'll hand it over to Russ, who will highlight how this is positively impacting our business segment results and key markets.
Thanks, Mike. In addition to my role as President and COO, I'm honored to be leading the Integration Management Office for Kimberly-Clark. It's still very early, but I'm energized by the opportunities we see and even more confident in our ability to deliver and eventually surpass the synergies we've previously outlined. The way the teams from both companies have been moving with speed and focus to bring KC and Kenvue together is truly impressive. Turning to Kimberly-Clark, we closed out a strong 2025 in a challenging environment. We can feel the momentum building across the company, and we're seeing the benefits of our power and care execution on the ground every day as we continue to out-innovate, out-market, and out-activate our competition.
Our results reflect our sustained focus on executing an innovation-led approach, meeting consumers where they are across the good, better, best ladder, and staying disciplined as we reinvest strong productivity gains behind our brands and capabilities. Like many in our industry, we do see elements of a challenging environment, with pressure on consumers, retailers, and geopolitical volatility. However, we strongly believe our strategy will serve Kimberly-Clark well and lead to value creation both today and over the long term. We've seen this play out in the last two years as we've been able to grow and develop our margins in some of the most competitive markets in the world. To that point, I'll start with our international Personal Care business. As highlighted previously, we've built a proven model in China based on superior value propositions at every price value tier.
KC has gained over 900 basis points of share in diapers over the past five years, while other national brands and local players have lost meaningful share. In part, as a result, we've seen local Chinese competition move their focus away from China and attempt to expand into new markets, from Latin America to North America and parts of Eastern Europe. We will remain focused on our winning formula, out-innovate, out-market, and out-activate with discipline across the world. In IPC, we're applying our playbook across focus and enterprise markets, and we're excited about our pipeline. In 2025, we invested prudently to maintain that momentum, and the strategy is translating into long-term value creation. From a financial perspective, we delivered strong volume mix-led organic growth for the year. Our organic growth accelerated to mid-single digit levels in the Q4 .
In fact, all of our IPC focus markets delivered volume-led organic growth in Q4. We gained roughly 0.5 point of weighted average market share in the year across our focus markets, along with meaningful gains in key country category combinations in enterprise markets. And with respect to operating profit, we sustained healthy margins with strong exit momentum in the Q4 . We are delivering strong productivity gains and overhead savings to fund investments and improve our brand propositions while driving brand love across our markets. In IPC, we're introducing innovations, focusing on our four benefit spaces with really exciting progress over the past year. In China, we enhanced Kotex's Gravity Pads with our new Absorb-to-the-Bottom technology that provides our consumers leak-free confidence.
The pads delivered a 100% improvement in absorption speed and reduced residue area by 60% for a cleaner, drier experience. We're building on the momentum by scaling Gravity in Brazil and other markets. Speaking of Brazil, we launched Huggies Cushion Protection, scaling our E-Cloud waistband technology from China and customizing it for Brazilian consumers. This diaper has superior absorption with up to 12 hours of leak protection and a softer waistband to reduce skin irritation, delivering garment-like comfort, protection, and freedom of movement. In Brazil, Huggies gained nearly 50 basis points of share in the Q4 and 40 basis points on the full year. In Indonesia Adult Care, we launched Confidence Daily Fresh Pants, which are thin and breathable, an important differentiator in Indonesia's hot and humid climate.
This innovation has led to strong results, with adult care growing 17% organically in Indonesia this year, led entirely by volume. We cascaded and customized the science-based Huggies Skin Essentials technology from North America into the South Korean market, where we're winning over consumers who prioritize skin health. This resulted in increased premiumization and 60 basis points of share gain on the year. In China, we introduced Huggies Natural Pro Deep Sleep Master Master. Uninterrupted sleep is a key need for both parents and baby, and this diaper is geared for high performance and comfort to keep baby sleeping soundly. It absorbs twice as fast, reduces leakage by over 60%, and delivers a 200% improvement in breathability. This is driving the overnights category, as it's been clinically proven to deliver 20% more deep sleep for baby.
During the two-month post-launch period, Huggies Natural Pro Deep Sleep Master ranked number one in launch revenue in the sleep category. The Powering Care operating model is enabling our best ideas to travel with speed, building brand love all over the world. We scaled the success of our Poise Giggle Dribble campaign with Katherine Heigl from the U.S. to Australia, where the brand is making an impact by crushing stigma around postpartum incontinence. This drove a meaningful consumption uptick, with Poise growing 11% in the quarter and 9% in the full year, outpacing the category and resulting in a 120 basis point share gain in the quarter and a 50 basis point share gain on the full year. We're also activating our brands in new ways, meeting consumers where they need us.
As one example, in the Q4 , we were the first brand in China to place sanitary pad vending machines in metro stations. In a country where 76% of women have encountered period challenges in public, and only 34% of the public locations are equipped with sanitary pads, our campaign is driving affinity and an uptick in search and product trial. In China, we've also built a unique and advantaged social media model that is resonating with local consumers, generating an incredible volume of organic digital engagement, building brand love, and driving business results. We've significantly increased pieces of content per month on Kotex, as just one example. Over the past year, we scaled our digital success to Indonesia, which is resulting in accelerated consumer recruitment and improved quality of content, and we're seeing the results, a significant improvement in growth and share in Indonesia.
We have plans to continue to scale and deploy the model more broadly. Turning to North America, we continue to find success through our focus on delivering better value propositions at every price tier and in every channel, particularly as consumers' wallets remain under pressure and competition becomes sharper. Our categories are essential, and our long-term strategy is to win through superior consumer value propositions and strong execution versus renting market share with promotion. On the top line, we delivered a third consecutive year of positive volume mix-led growth, demonstrating the returns on the significant investments we made in our marketing and innovation capabilities, as well as the power of our commercial execution engine. In the Q4 , we saw resilient demand for our brands and a strong interest in our innovations, despite a fairly choppy external environment.
Gains in North America were broad-based across Personal Care, Family Care , and KC Professional. We grew 80 basis points on an organic basis in the quarter, with volume plus mix up 1.8%, despite the weighted average growth in our consumer categories slowing to 0.5% versus the prior year. Weighted share was broadly in line with the prior year in both the quarter and the year. Personal Care grew value share 20 basis points in the year, led by a volume share gain of over 90 basis points. At the profit line, we grew operating profit dollars versus the prior year, despite a 330 basis point impact from exiting the private label business during the year. This reflected a combination of volume plus mix-led growth, as well as strong ongoing productivity gains and SG&A efficiencies driving margin expansion.
In North America, we've spent the last two years focusing on out-innovating, out-activating, and out-marketing our competition, and we're seeing strong results despite the environment. In 2025, Kleenex delivered its highest share in the last nine years in North America. Our innovation pipeline has contributed to a meaningful portfolio refresh, with consumer-directed innovation focused on key benefit spaces of leak-free confidence, garment-like comfort, skin health, and overnights. We continue to cascade innovation across the value spectrum to drive premiumization. As we run our global playbook to lead category growth in our North America diaper business, we've been innovating across the Huggies franchise.
For example, to enhance Little Movers for active toddlers, we introduced SnugFit 360 in the U.S. market, with a slip-on format and flexible waistband designed to move with babies during play and provide an extra secure fit for up to 100% blowout and leak-free protection. This diaper was named the Disposable Diaper Product of the Year by Baby Innovation Awards, the leading independent body that rates innovation in the baby care industry. We launched Huggies Skin Essentials diapers with a proprietary skin protect liner. This feature protects baby skin from the top causes of rash, mess, and moisture by pulling them away from the skin. In fact, the skin protect liner leaves behind up to five times less mess than the leading store brand, offering a great value proposition in the premium tier.
We also launched dermatologist-approved Huggies Pull-Ups Skin Essentials, our softest training pant, with a 100% breathable cover. Early last year, Huggies Snug & Dry softness made its U.S. debut. Consistent with our strategy, we cascaded core benefits from higher tiers to provide consumers with an outstanding value proposition. It's the softest diaper in the U.S. value tier and offers outstanding protection with our complex core technology. In fact, Good Housekeeping named it the Best Overall Disposable Diaper of the Year. This is evidence of our wiring in action. Our teams around the world leverage the best global technology and supply chain to bring innovation and quality upgrades to our largest market very quickly and at scale. We've raised our marketing game to reinforce brand love with an emotionally resonant creative and an authentic, high-impact celebrity partnerships designed to break the stigma associated with everyday adult care.
In 2025, we continued to accelerate the Poise brand through creative marketing. More than 50% of women across all stages of life experience bladder leaks, but very few talk about it. Our honest and authentic Giggle Dribble campaign, featuring Katherine Heigl, is helping to destigmatize this very common condition. The humorous and honest campaign is winning with consumers and driving category growth. The campaign generated a 36% increase in first-time buyers in the Q1 and a 26% increase in sales year-over-year at key online customers in the same quarter. Because great ideas travel, the campaign was then scaled to Australia, where it drove meaningful share gains.
To encourage men to take charge of their health this year, we also built on the success of our partnership with Emmitt Smith for Depend and launched a new partnership with Deion Sanders in Q3, who shared that he depends on Depend. These investments are enabling us to convene conversations about topics that are difficult to discuss, breaking down the barriers to entry and recruiting new consumers into the category. As a result, we're driving penetration across cohorts in the category expansion, extending the leadership position of our powerhouse brands. Similarly, we're reinforcing brand love and awareness in baby and childcare using breakthrough storytelling and digital engagement. Beginning in the Q3 , our campaign featured NBA star Giannis and introduced Huggies Little Movers SnugFit to the U.S. market. The campaign featured emotionally resonant creative that struck a chord with parents.
We garnered over 1.8 billion paid impressions and 2.4 billion earned media impressions, with 60.2 million unique users in just the month of June. This earned us roughly a 30% higher ROI than all ads in the prior year and achieved one of our most successful Huggies campaigns to date. Our Goodnites brand Mission Dry campaign launched in the Q2 . Retired astronaut Scott Kelly crushed stigma around bedwetting, and we fueled this with a social-first movement for kids and parents to share our assets across online communities with our Goodnites brand at the center. This drove record performance in our youth pants category. Goodnites saw a 277% increase in product searches on Google, a 44% uptick in brand engagement, and 92% positive sentiment across all platforms.
So the traction we're seeing with consumers, including our ability to turn digital insights and capabilities into performance, is translating to strengthen partnerships with retailers. In 2025, we were ranked as the number 2 overall CPG by our customers in the Advantage Survey of retailers, and that's out of the top 80 or so CPG companies. We had previously been ranked number 1 across all CPG companies by our customers for 3 consecutive years. We're proud of our retail partners' recognition of our efforts to deliver outstanding value and partnerships to them, and we're also proud of our number 1 ranking in key subcategories, including reputation and our relationship with our most important customers. I'll now turn it over to Nelson, who's going to walk through our financial results and outlook.
Thank you, Russ. Along with our operating performance, our transformation continues to gain momentum from a financial perspective. We've taken significant actions to strengthen our ability to consistently deliver revenue and earnings growth, along with strong free cash flow, while preserving a robust balance sheet. We've addressed historical earnings volatility through purposeful actions taken over the last four years, including portfolio realignment, which is shown in our financial performance, and we're remaining very disciplined in our capital deployment as we simultaneously increase CapEx to grow the business, maintain a strong balance sheet and our commitment to our single A credit rating, and grow our dividend payout to shareholders. All these factors will make our acquisition of Kenvue quickly accretive to earnings and value-enhancing to shareholders.
Starting with our 2025 financials, we had a strong year, performing while transforming, as we exited a large private label diaper contract in North America and began the hard work to stand up our International Family Care and Professional business as an independent operating entity. In the Q4 , we delivered 2% organic growth on the back of 3% volume plus mix growth, even though global weighted average category growth in the quarter slowed to roughly 60 basis points from a run rate of approximately 2% during the prior nine months. We delivered the strong year-on-year Q4 Adjusted Operating Profit and Adjusted EPS growth we anticipated, despite having shifted a significant amount of new product trial driving programming from Q3 into Q4.
Finally, we generated Adjusted Free Cash Flow of $1.9 billion in the year, largely in line with our previous estimate. All this confirms our ability to deliver relatively consistent performance across quarters, with balanced first half, second half results, even with the emergence of tariff-related impacts and heightened competitive activity, which required fast actions to adapt as the year unfolded. The same can be said for the first two years of our Powering Care strategy, as we've delivered industry-leading volume plus mix growth along with margin expansion. Since launching Powering Care, we have delivered solid performance while driving significant operational and strategic transformation.
As Mike mentioned, we turned the corner from a pricing-led growth to a more balanced, positive volume plus mix growth in 2024, much sooner than expected, with a meaningful acceleration in volume growth in 2025 as we out-innovate, out-market, and out-activate in all our categories. At Adjusted Gross Margin , we were one of the first of our peers to return gross margins to pre-pandemic levels in the second half of 2023. Since then, we've expanded margins further with industry-leading productivity, while at the same time funding significant investments in product differentiation and managing through unanticipated cost inflation, including tariff-driven costs that were partly mitigated in 2025.
Moving forward, as we fully mitigate tariff-related costs and continue to deliver industry-leading productivity, our visibility to achieving Adjusted Gross Margin of at least 40% before the end of the decade remains strong. In overheads, we've made multi-year investments in our global infrastructure to support innovation, revenue growth management, digital platforms across the supply chain, go-to-market enhancements, as well as ERP upgrades, a set of capabilities that will serve as a plug-and-play solution for the Kenvue integration. At the same time, we've remained very disciplined on costs through a lean operating structure, reducing overheads by 80 basis points of sales in the last 2 years. It's worth noting that we've done that despite the deleveraging effect of nearly $1 billion of business exits in the past few years.
Our strong overheads leverage as Powering Care initiatives begin to take hold, has not only helped expand our Adjusted Operating Profit margins by 100 basis points in the past two years, it also puts us well on pace to our aspiration of reaching at least 18%-20% before the end of the decade. This performance, together with further due diligence we've done since announcing the Kenvue acquisition, underpins our confidence and visibility to creating significant value and industry-leading returns in the years ahead. Finally, on capital policy and cash flow performance, we have been consistently improving our cash conversion cycle, going from 6 days in 2021 to around negative 10 days at the close of 2025.
A 16-day improvement with a step-up in the last few years as operating profit growth picked up and we drove more working capital discipline while maintaining a healthy level of investment in the business. This year, we began stepping up CapEx as a % of sales beyond our normalized level of 4%-5%. This is part of our supply chain transformation designed to sustain industry-leading productivity savings, as well as strengthen our ability to continue delivering the best products at the lowest costs.
Nonetheless, we have continued to generate strong Adjusted Free Cash Flow in line with our Powering Care algorithm of approximately $2 billion, and our leverage remains below the 2x net debt to EBITDA ratio, consistent with our single-A credit rating. Overall, both our results and the progress in the transformation of our business in 2025 position us well to continue to improve our trajectory in 2026 and beyond. Our transformation is gaining momentum. We've addressed the volatility of the past through discipline, process, and portfolio actions, and we're well equipped to continue performing while we undertake a generational transformation of our company.
To be clear, we expect both the pending international Family Care and professional business transaction and the Kenvue acquisition to improve our ability to deliver the consistent top-tier growth we laid out with our long-term financial algorithm when we unveiled our power and care strategy in March 2024. To remind you, our long-term algorithm is focused on organic top-line growth ahead of the categories and markets we participate in, and top-tier constant currency growth on the bottom line. In the very near term, in advance of closing the Kenvue acquisition, we firmly believe our continuing businesses, North America and International Personal Care, are well-positioned to lead the categories and markets while delivering mid- to high-single-digit constant currency growth in Adjusted Operating Profit over the long term.
We also believe that as our international Family Care and professional business transitions to a 49% joint venture interest, we will remain well-positioned to deliver mid- to high-single-digit constant currency Adjusted EPS growth, as well as Adjusted Free Cash Flow of approximately $2 billion annually. For 2026, we've built a robust, achievable plan that creates value, is focused on further differentiating our brands, and ensures we have healthy levels of investment across our value chain. For the full year, we're targeting organic growth in line to ahead of category growth from both our North America and international Personal Care businesses. Last year, weighted average category growth was approximately 2%, even though Q4 was a bit softer, primarily due to year-on-year comparisons.
At Adjusted Operating Profit , we project another strong year with a mid- to high single-digit growth on a constant currency basis, assuming a mid-year close of the international Family Care and professional transaction. We are aiming to be at the high end of this range, partly driven by mitigating the stranded costs resulting from contributing the assets of the international Family Care and professional business to the joint venture. For Adjusted EPS growth from continuing operations on a constant currency basis, we expect double-digit growth as the close of the international Family Care and professional transaction results in an approximately 30% increase in income from equity companies for the full year. Our outlook also assumes an Adjusted Effective Tax Rate of approximately 23%.
We're also assuming relatively flat net interest expense and shares outstanding, as we plan to hold the proceeds from the IFP transaction in cash to help fund the cash portion of the Kenvue acquisition. For Adjusted EPS attributable to total Kimberly-Clark, we expect to be in line with 2025 levels on a constant currency basis. This will essentially reflect underlying growth consistent with our long-term algorithm, partly offset by the reduction in income from discontinued operations, which we expect to be half of the 2025 level, with a mid-year projected close of the international Family Care and professional transaction. Also note, following the close of this transaction, Adjusted EPS from continuing operations and Adjusted EPS attributable to Kimberly-Clark should be the same on a quarterly basis.
Finally, we remain well positioned to deliver approximately $2 billion of Adjusted Free Cash Flow consistent with 2025 levels, even as we accelerate capital investments in our growth and transformation plans to approximately $1.3 billion, up from $1.1 billion last year. As far as pacing during the year, we entered 2026 with good momentum from our second half 2025 innovations and a great pipeline of new products launching in the first half of the year that will fuel with strong marketing and retail execution. As a result, we currently expect net sales to be balanced, roughly 50/50, between the first half and the second half of the year. While Adjusted Operating Profit should be closer to a 48/52 first half versus second half split.
Also, keep in mind that the dilution from the IFP transaction will impact DPS in the second half of the year, which should result in Adjusted EPS attributable to Kimberly-Clark being split roughly 53% first half, 47% second half of the year. This includes the impact of our decision to retain the proceeds of the IFP transaction to fund part of the cash consideration for the Kenvue acquisition. Beyond 2026, and assuming a year-end close of the Kenvue acquisition, we believe the combination of strong cost synergy opportunities and the complementarity of the two portfolios will enable us to deliver on algorithm-Adjusted EPS growth in the mid to high single-digit range.... on a two-year CAGR from 2026 to 2028. As we've highlighted previously, we built our acquisition model on a conservative set of assumptions.
As you would have seen in the S-4 disclosures, we made conservative assumptions with a significant reinvestment plan for Kenvue's base business. This includes a multi-year ramp of Kenvue's organic growth back to organic growth in line with category growth, as well as a meaningful step up in marketing and R&D beyond the reinvestment of revenue synergies. We have a clear path to strong synergies that we can deliver and eventually exceed. Of the $1.9 billion of cost synergies, we expect to achieve roughly 40% in the first year from closing, 40% in year two, and the remaining 20% in year three. By contrast, we have conservatively modeled the pace of revenue synergies to be evenly spread across the first four years from closing.
We expect this to result in no more than mid-single-digit dilution to Adjusted EPS in 2027 versus our standalone plan, reflecting the impacts of debt issuance, deal amortization, synergy timing, and base business reinvestment. This should then be followed by significant accretion in 2028 from a combination of base business growth and the majority of synergy realization taking hold, resulting in a 2026 to 2028 Adjusted EPS CAGR, well within our mid to high single digit Adjusted EPS algorithm. In summary, we've built robust, achievable plans based on extensive diligence that creates significant value. With that, I will turn it back to Mike for some closing thoughts.
Thanks, Nelson. For more than 150 years, we have delivered essential everyday care that improves people's lives. Over the past two years, Powering Care has positioned us to do that even better. We are realizing the vision of the renewed and refreshed Kimberly-Clark, with a strengthened commitment to delivering for our shareholders and consumers. I'm proud of the team's performance in 2025. We performed while transforming in a very dynamic environment, and we are well-positioned to capitalize on the tremendous opportunities ahead in 2026. Our transformation has put us on a virtuous cycle of value creation, driven by an innovation-led volume and mix growth model, industry-leading productivity, and an organization wired for speed and consistency.
Our acquisition of Kenvue builds on our successful transformation, creating a preeminent consumer health and wellness company that will serve billions of consumers across every stage of life, with portfolios that are highly complementary across categories and geographies. We look forward to talking more about our path ahead next month at the CAGNY Conference. I'll be joined by members of our leadership team to detail our innovation pipeline and commercial engine, and how we'll apply our expertise to execute on the unique value creation opportunity the Kenvue acquisition presents. Thank you for your time and interest in Kimberly-Clark.